downtime
Multiple folks are reporting Gmail delivery issues today — both “571” style spam bounce blocks and spam folder placement. Some of the affected folks seem to be sending corporate mail, outbound from Proofpoint or Microsoft O365 hosted environments. It happens to some folks from time to time, but there are enough reports of it out in the wild that I think that perhaps Google released a significant Gmail filter update within the past 1-3 days and that it might be a bit buggy. It already sounds like some of those same folks are now seeing improvement. If you’re affected, be sure to submit sample messages via the Gmail Sender Contact Form — though they do not always respond, they do review every ticket, and in a scenario like this, sending them data and feedback is important. (Click here to learn more about that sender form process.)Of course, you need to
Google and various news outlets are reporting that Gmail had a significant outage today (Saturday, December 10th). Google reports that as of 4:16 PM UTC (10:16 AM US central time) things are on the mend, but that there’s a backlog of messages to be delivered.I can’t tell if senders found inbound delivery attempts delayed with 4xx errors, or if Google servers accepted messages then sat on them. Message delivery to the inbox, however, was definitely delayed for folks (observed by myself, too), regardless of what the backend systems were doing.
Multiple folks over on the Mailop list are reporting that Microsoft OLC (Outlook.com/Hotmail/etc)’s IPv6 inbound mail servers are deferring inbound mail delivery attempts with “451 4.7.500 Server busy. Please try again later” errors. The fix seems to be to stop trying to send it over IPv6 and send the mail to any IPv4 MX record instead, and then your queues will drain successfully.What domains are affected? Likely all domains I’ve listed here as handled by Microsoft, and only if you send over IPv6, and only if the recipient domain is a Microsoft-hosted domain that has an MX record with a hostname that maps to an IPv6 address.If you’re sending mail using an ESP or CRM platform, you’re probably not affected by this. Big mail sending platforms, especially US-based ones, almost exclusively use IPv4 IP addresses, not IPv6.Why is this affecting mail over IPv6 only? Nothing has been confirmed, but I
Ohio broadband provider Buckeye Broadband is reporting that its bex.net email service is offline. If you’re a sender, I recommend pausing all sends to bex.net (and any other domains pointing at mx*.buckeyecom.net, if possible) until you see an all clear message from the ISP posted here.Toledo’s 13ABC Action News reports that the issue is due to a ransomware attack.
It’s not just you! Many folks are reporting that Google Postmaster Tools is currently showing no data. I’m seeing this as well. In my case, my last data points appear to be from December 29th or so. At least one person suggested the outage goes back further than that, but I wasn’t able to confirm that myself. I am, however, reliably informed that there is indeed a broad issue occurring, that the right people at Google have been made aware of the issue and are working on getting the issue addressed. Stay tuned; I’ll post updates as I learn more.
The good people at email platform provider Fastmail (whom I’ve blogged about more than once previously) are dealing with a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Not fun. I feel for them.From Twitter: Over the last two days, service has been interrupted several times. This is the result of an ongoing attack against Fastmail as well as other email providers. We’re working with network service providers and law enforcement to put an end to the problem.– @Fastmail – 9:31 PM – Oct 22, 2021Fastmail users and interested parties, you can find current status information on their system status site here. Their two most recent updates that I see (current as of 6:25 pm Chicago time on Saturday October 23rd) combine to say:”We have multiple mitigations in place against the DDOS attacks and we are continuing to monitor. No mail has been lost, your data remains safe and services are operational.” … “DDOS protection…
I’ve received multiple reports from different folks that Google Postmaster Tools (GPT) and Google’s DMARC reporting have both been offline since sometime around October 4th. GPT is still accessible but has no data later than 10/3, and for those used to receiving DMARC reports from Google, none have been received since 10/3.I’ll share more information when known. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any updates.(As an aside, Google has a helpful DMARC overview and tutorial for domain administrators. It’s worth reading!)[ H/T: Hagop Khatchoian, Benjamin Billon and others. ]